this post was submitted on 07 May 2026
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Programming
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This reads awfully familiar. Recently a colleague retired. The company knew about that in advance and did: Nothing. No handover prepared. No knowledge transfer planned. Nothing. Poof, 30 years of institutional knowledge gone. No problem, we have AI.
For some reason managers now vibecode greenfield projects and ask experienced engineers to fix their mess. I asked for functional documentation. What did you feed the prompt? What gap tries this project to fill? What are the use cases? What exactly are you going to deploy? They don't know. They tried retrofitting that info through AI but didn't even bother to read the results, nevermind validating them against the actual behavior of the application. Because, render me surprised, this requires domain knowledge and getting your hands dirty.
So I dug through the generated code and found 200 issues. Invited them to a presentation where I tried explaining that we're looking at 2-4 years of worth of backlog. Those are only technical ones. Of course they had already pitched the idea of going live within two months to the C-suite. Great, now please define a feature set as MVP and I'll see how to patch it up so it won't blow up in your face. Maintainance of a product that large will provide enough work for a team of 6 engineers working fulltime on it.
They were not having any of that and instead started challenging my estimates. You must deliver one fixed issue per day - through AI. We will retrofit the docs to figure out what the application does - through AI. Why did you not create the functional docs through AI during the review. AI here, AI there. Let's skip code reviews with AI. AI is the solution. Let's onboard more engineers through AI. Let's use math to make that number friendly: 200 issues / 3 engineers = 67 days until all issues are fixed. Problem solved.
That thing that I became captain of. Is it even a ship? I can't tell anymore.
That's wild. Your managers' reaction to "the project made by AI has created 2-4 years of work by experienced engineers, perhaps up to 6 of them, before it's ready" was "why don't you use more AI??"?
I'm starting to think Mao had a point when he sent the business owners to do farm work. Barring a revolution, I can only hope the effective cost of inference rises du much as to make these dipshits back off from wanting it to do all the labor ever.
I really wish I was joking but they simply fail to grasp the size of the project. All they see is this pretty animated UI, barely held together by "make it work" prompts. So AI still is like a magic wand fixing everything. Did I mention nobody involved in that decision has any relevant background?
That's why this post resonates so hard. Time to check how much is left on the mortgage.
You have all my sympathies. Someone in another post/thread brought up the idea of a support group for burned out devs/tech workers in general. I definitely think there's something between that and unionization that is both needed and starting to be possible. Heck, even in the hackernews comments for this article there was at least one person telling another "welcome to luddism!" as both resonated with the spirit of the article itself.
I work in a company that was started by the devs themselves. I went from hearing "the code is the best documentation!" (No it isn't, it's spaghetti) to "every task should be done in, at most, a day" (and now we have more support tickets and open PRs nobody has time to look at than ever)
Meanwhile I just feel more and more burnt out. The worst is the mental load of having to wrangle the tool that actively works against me and generates bad code faster than I'm able to write good code.